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Smith
Track and Field Celebrates 25
Members
of Smith’s track and field past will gather on campus
this Saturday, February 4, to celebrate the team’s 25th
anniversary, as current team members host the annual Tartan
Co-Ed Invitational.
In 1981, the same
year the National Collegiate Athletic Association inaugurated
its track and field championship tournament, Smith’s
team shed its club status and joined the ranks of the college’s
other 14 varsity intercollegiate sports programs. That year,
the college also became the first women’s institution
to join the NCAA, beginning its affiliation as a Division
III competitor, as it remains today.
In 1981, Smith’s
first 21 track and field competitors thrived despite having
only a three-quarter-mile outdoor cinder running track to
practice on. “We took advantage of the opportunity to
travel over to Amherst College three days a week in our first
season to run on their indoor dirt track,” recalls Peter
de Villiers, professor of psychology and the team’s
first head coach. “We would aim to arrive at Amherst
at the end of their practice so as to not interfere with them.
Nevertheless, in our first indoor season we had five runners
qualify for the EAIAW (Eastern Association for Intercollegiate
Athletics for Women) Division III Indoor Championships, where
they performed creditably.” During the outdoor season
that year, despite bad weather, six Smith records were broken
and 10 athletes had personal best performances for their events,
de Villiers says.
The program grew
quickly from that year to the point that it became an expectation
that several records be broken each year. During Mary Jane
Grinaker’s 10-year coaching stint (1982–92), Smith
tracksters went on a record-breaking assault, shattering 40
indoor school records and 54 in the outdoor season, not to
mention 19 All American and five individual national championship
honors. And the facilities improved.
The team kicked
off the 1985 campaign with a new all-weather, 400-meter, eight-lane
track, giving Smith the opportunity to host home track and
field meets for the first time. The 1986-87 squad enjoyed
the completion of the new Indoor Track & Tennis (ITT)
facility, which housed a 200-meter, six-lane, Mondo Super
X track that played host to the ECAC Division III Championships
that season, at which Smith finished an impressive sixth among
30 teams. With Smith’s new track and field facilities
favored by New England schools as among the best in the east,
Smith continued to prove competitive and hosted the NCAA Division
III Men’s and Women’s Indoor National Championships
the following year, and again in 1990 and 1996.
Following Grinaker’s
departure in 1992, Martha Grinnell-Sorensen filled a one-year
stint as the program transitioned into a new era. In 1993,
that new era began when women’s track and field pioneer,
Carla Coffey, took over. Coffey has twice been named New England
Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference (NEWMAC)
Coach of the Year (1997 and 2004), has coached three student
athletes to NEWMAC Athlete of the Year honors (Teresa Winstead
’97, Amy Saari ’98, and Sara Lewicke ’02,),
10 who have received one or multiple NEWMAC All-Conference
honors, and 10 All American honorees.
Last year’s
track and field squad reached many of its goals and gave consistent
performances, including a 13th place finish in the New England
III Indoor Championship and 24th place finish at the outdoor
championship.
Optimism abounds as the 2006 team seeks to improve upon last
season's fourth-place finish at the NEWMAC Championship.
On Saturday, some
40 alumnae and past coaches will return to Northampton to
celebrate the team’s silver anniversary. The event will
kick off with a fun run around campus that may includ a detour
around the same three-quarter mile cinder track that served
as the program’s original training area. A nostalgia
brunch in Ainsworth Gymnasium will follow while, down the
hall in the ITT, Smith Track & Field present will compete
in the Tartan Invitational. The event will close with an evening
reception and dinner at the Smith College Club, with track
and field members past and present.
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